A couple of people have asked me where we can find the UKCFUG on groups.adobe.com.  For those who want to know, it's here:

http://groups.adobe.com/groups/4417201ddb

Note that groups is still very much a case of "wet paint" and stuff is changing all the time.  I've poked Adobe about the issues.

What is MAX?
From wikipedia "Adobe MAX is a large annual event held by Adobe in North America, Europe and Japan. The purpose of the event to provide unique opportunities for those in the computer design and development industries to connect and learn the latest cutting-edge technologies that Adobe releases." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_MAX)

This year's European event is taking place December 1st - 3rd in Milan, Italy. If you're interested in Adobe's technology roadmap, new product announcements or want to learn more about the Adobe Platform and Adobe through hands-on labs and over 50 Flex developer sessions then MAX Europe is for you. Use the session browser to explore all the sessions at MAX: http://max.adobe.com/eu/sessions/browser/

MAX highlights
This year, there are a host of speakers travelling from the UK to speak at MAX, alongside Adobe product managers, evangelists and designers & developers from all around the world. Here are some of the sessions from UK speakers:

- James Whittaker (RefreshingApps.com), "Perfecting the user experience in Adobe AIR"
- Samuel Williams (LBi), "Building Flex applications with PureMVC"
- Neil Middleton (Monochrome), "Structuring your development team and getting the work done"
- Mike Jones (FlashGen), "Debugging and profiling with Flex Builder"
- Rob Bateman (Away3D), "Finding Away3D"
- Stefan Richter (FlashComGuru), "Building collaborative applications with Flash Media Server"
- Carlos Ulloa (Papervision3D), "Advanced Papervision3D"-
- Rick Williams (AKQA), "Anatomy of a seriously sophisticated AIR application"
- Dom O'Brien (Glue London), "Interactive Video Campaigns"

More information here: http://www.ashorten.com/2008/10/07/announcing-uk-speakers-at-max-europe/

Organising Flights & Hotels
EasyJet have flights to Milan from around £50 - http://www.easyjet.com/
BA have flights to Milan from around £100 - http://www.britishairways.com/
Hotels - there are hotels on Expedia from around £45 a night staying near the Central Station. A map of recommended hotels is available here: http://max.adobe.com/eu/experience/downloads/MAX2008_MilanHotelMap.pdf

UK get together
The Flex User Group London are planning to hold a get together dinner on Sunday night in Milan for all attendees travelling from the UK - come and network with UK developers before the event starts, pick up your exclusive MAX T-Shirt and plan out your agenda for the conference. As a bonus, Adobe are sponsoring the drinks!! Meetup for it is here.

Use the discount code!!
As user group members you can use the discount code UKI816 to get a full 3 day conference pass for 599 Euros (approx £400). If you need a letter to persuade your boss that you should go to MAX you can download and print from here!

The first episode of the CF Doc's UKCFUG podcast is finally live! 

In this episode we cover subjects such as: is there a future for coldfusion, what is the state of the Coldfusion market, dealing with webservices, should you use a framework, how about ajax and frameworks, which conference should I attend, should you pay for ColdFusion and when is the right time to prune your apple tree?

This podcast was recorded in front of a live audience and unfortunately some of the audio is very quiet, but you can understand from the answers what was asked. This was because of a microphone malfunction. Hopefully by the time we record the next episode the microphone situation will be resolved.

You can subscribe via iTunes or download it directly

If you would like to send in you questions you can email them to podcast@ukcfug.org or skype in your questions and leave a message to ukcfug